Beside the prison wall of stone,
Where winter turns the breath to frost,
A woman stands, yet not alone,
Amid the registry of lost.

Three hundred mornings in the queue,
With parcel clutched in trembling hand,
To buy the mercy overdue
Across a silenced, frozen land.

The Neva drifts in sullen gray,
A lifeless sheet of slate that led;
No song will welcome back the day,
No bells will toll above the dead.

“Can anyone describe this grief?”
A woman whispered through the pale;
She answered, "I can," past belief,
And took the weight of Russia’s veil.

She calls to mind the first to fall—
Her soldier-poet, early slain—
No marker left beside the wall,
No cross upon the muddy plain.

The gunfire claimed his proud desire,
A severed youth, an unhealed scar;
Yet still she guards his lyric fire
Beneath an indifferent, freezing star.

And then the shadow at the door:
They took the son her body bore,
Whose childhood laughed upon the chore,
Now chained upon a dungeon floor.

“My son, my life, my blinded sight,
Who lies upon the convict’s bed?”
She wrestles with the terror-night,
A mother pleading for the dead.

Oh cruel, beloved fatherland,
That devours its children in the dark,
With iron heel and bloody hand,
Extinguishing each noble spark!

She would not flee your bitter soil,
Nor barter sorrow for reprieve;
She stays to share the people’s toil,
To watch, to witness, and to grieve.

Despair is hammered into pyre,
Yet madness finds no easy feast;
A soul refined through holy fire
Refuses tribute to the beast.

Stone eyes outstare the sudden ban,
Though all her cherished loves are gone,
And woman turns to bronze and iron
To outendure the tyrant’s dawn.

Instead, a monument she weaves
From whispered grief and midnight dread,
More durable than fallen leaves,
To name each broken, unwept head.

“And if they ever raise my stone
Upon the land that watched me break,
Erect it where the cold was known,
Beside the wall they could not shake—”

“Where drops of melting ice may run
Like blinded tears from blinded eyes,
Until the mother and the son
Are answered by the barren skies.”